Thursday, April 05, 2007

Nurturing Creativity

It looks as if moderation, or maybe technical problems, has set in for me at Cosmic Variance. So I have to go from the last statement made there by Lee that I was allowed to contribute. To continue with the points I am making.

I was glad to see Jacques was continuing where David B seems to have decided the futility of dealing with these issues of the String theory backlash.

Lee Smolin:When there was little selection we naturally got a wide diversity of types of scientists, which was good for science. My view is that we need that diversity, we need both the hill climbers and the valley crossers, the technical masters and the seers full of questions and ideas.

Raphael Bousso and Joseph Polchinski in "The String Theory Landscape" September 2004 Scientific issue speak exactly to what Lee is saying and descriptively allow us to see the pattern underlying Lee's comment. Maybe George Musser will release it for the group to inspect here

If you did not continue with understanding the "topography of the energy involved" in terms of what the string theory landscape was doing, then you would have never understood the "hills and valleys" in the context of string theory landscape being described?

IN retrospect decisions we make will always resound with what we should have done, but that misses the boat when coming to the "creative abilities?" What we see may "institute a productive research group?" You exchange one for another?

Lee Smolin:Is string theory in fact perturbatively finite? Many experts think so. I worry that if there were a clear way to a proof it would have been found and published, so I find it difficult to have a strong expectation, either way, on this issue.

The fact that a way had been describe in terms of developing the "Triple Torus" speaks to the continued development of the string theory landscape? How could you conclusively finish off this statement and then from it describe the state of the union, when this had already been explained technically?

You had to see the context of the triple torus in relation too where the string landscape places were placing these modular forms. If I had said E8 and the continued development of modular form, what would this represent?

The complexity of the forms themself are limited and finite so how could one claim that such work on the landscape is futile in regards to infinities?